I’ve really enjoyed 2020’s flowering of Substack writers, but I also enjoyed this criticism of the medium’s impact on thought: nintil.com/substack-milqu
One reframing: is there an adjacent model which can support book-depth thought? Or even three-month-essay-depth thought?
Conversation
Isn’t this just (ideal) universities? Monetize via teaching (easy evergreen content) to fund incremental progress (paper publishing); collect best longer ideas into books with addl upside from long ideas via publishing $. Startup=paid coursera+substack+Stripe press?
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Hm. Maybe it’s not a fair comparison, but at my uni, tuition accounts for ~1% of operating expenses, or about ~10% of salaries. Lots of overhead, for sure, but that’s a rough starting point!
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Hm… I don’t think that first reaction was very good. Better to just think about the unit economics. Especially for online courses it’s easy to imagine selling a few thousand $300 products per year while paying mid-$10^4 to TA types. That paints a rosier picture.
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There are certainly lots of web personalities offering popular online courses. Hard to think of examples where that’s clearly being used as “fuel” for “the real work,” but that may just be because I’m not well connected to that scene. I’d be curious!
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Actually, Edward Tufte’s an interesting example. He sells out huge auditoriums for several hundred dollar one-day workshops. That’s let him spend a decade-plus on his most recent book (and his sculpture…)